Yesterday morning, Senate Republicans — with the exception of Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — narrowly defeated an attempt to prohibit Trump’s $1.776 “anti-weaponization” fund to basically pay off the people who attacked the Capitol on his behalf on January 6, 2021. Once again, it seems like there is just no red line. I personally want to say that I’m not surprised, but I’ll admit, every time the bar gets lower, I am kinda surprised. Maybe I’m just naive.
One of the questions I’ve been looking into in my research on complicity is how wrongdoers channel the loyalty of the people under them and conscript them into becoming complicit. This has come up because as I look into some of the common traits among whistleblowers and moral rebels, they are invariably looking at a tradeoff between different values, and they have to make a choice on where their loyalty lies. One the one hand, they may belong to a tight-knit group: a police force, a religious order, a corporation where they make tons of money…and on the other hand, there are either fundamental principles and/or real people being harmed by whatever activity they are a part of. To choose one means abandoning the other. If they act on principle, or to speak on behalf of the people being harmed, they lose their belonging in the group. If they stay loyal to their group, they have to rationalize the harm they are causing. If you go back and look at the moral rebels I’ve been speaking to as part of my Complicity and Courage series, they all describe some point where they had to make this choice, as well. In each instance, they were able to resist the pressure to remain “loyal” to the wrongdoer, and instead act in service of a higher duty/loyalty.
One of the books I have come across in my research is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion (2012), which argues that liberals and conservatives aren’t just disagreeing about policy — they’re operating from different moral foundations altogether. Haidt identifies six: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty. His finding is that liberals weight the first two most heavily, while conservatives draw more evenly across all six — with Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity doing particular work.
I don’t have a verdict on the entire thesis yet (it feels like the book was not anticipating the political moment we find ourselves in today — 2012 was a very different time), but it does offer an interesting insight into why today’s Republicans might be especially susceptible to a right-wing strongman. The Loyalty/Authority/Sanctity trifecta very much mirrors the traits of the “authoritarian personality,” which includes punishing out-groups (loyalty), obeying hierarchy (authority), and an attachment to tradition (sanctity, i.e., the lost and glorious past). However, if you are in the “tribe,” loyalty probably doesn’t feel like you’re a fascist, it feels like a virtue.
[I think it’s important to point out that, even if Haidt’s thesis has merit, it doesn’t mean that liberals aren’t vulnerable to succumbing to a different kind of populist demagogue: both Care and Fairness are value vectors subject to demagogic capture (think leftist revolutionary movements and coups). The difference right now is simply which kind of demagogue we’re dealing with.]
I want to acknowledge that most, if not all, of the GOP Senators going along with Trump are doing so for opportunistic reasons or out of fear. But the point is that they have to rationalize their actions, and if loyalty is seen within the in-group as a virtue, that offers them a convenient moral off-ramp to not have to grapple with the actual implications of what they are going along with.
Again, the distinguishing feature of the moral rebels I have been talking to on my Substack is that they had loyalty to values — like truth, justice, honor, and empathy, to name a few — above tribal conformity. I don’t want to spoil the chapter I am working on but one of my takeaways is that knowing your own personal values hierarchy in advance is an important piece of keeping your moral compass in check when the pressure is on and you’re asked to demonstrate your loyalty — to a person, an institution, or a policy you know is wrong. (And, before you write this off as an “easy” decision, I’ve got about a hundred case studies showing that people just like you and me can and do flail when that moment of truth arrives.)
Curious if you have thought about this or have had an experience that made you have to decide: To what do you owe your highest loyalty?
This is why I keep pushing harder on the “heritage reclamation” project to secure citizenship by descent in an EU member country. During the week reports came out about another whistleblower report over DOGE attempt to civic un-person people en masse through abusing the Death Master File (“DMF”) at Social Security Administration. DMF is treated as nearly the literal gospel as to whether someone is alive or not so moving people’s records into it while they are still living is a disaster. When I was at IRS we had not so happy times trying to get DMF corrected when people were accidentally added to the file through various bureaucratic blunders and found that they were basically locked out of their lives. DOGE was trying to intentionally do that to millions in a single batch job, though, to terrorize immigrants and undesirables.
Loyalty is kinda hard when you’re ready to terrorize your population like that. Most think of terrorizing populations as what happened in Minneapolis. This is perhaps the scarier version. A cold hand preparing a batch job for a mainframe to wipe out your civic existence while you still live and breath creates damaged lives and essentially conditional existence for us all. If it is immigrants today it could be anybody tomorrow as DMF runs on an ancient decades old mainframe that doesn’t care.
Initially it felt disloyal seeking dual citizenship. Now it feels protective. I know how easy it is to access those systems to impact the data integrity of DMF so even Markwayne Mullin could do it from his desk.
This column was really thought provoking! I am going to print this, stick it on my bulletin board and think about it a lot.